I had a piece in Independent Australia last week about Albanese’s increasingly rightwing (or just plain odd) political positions. If I had remembered to suggest a headline, it would have been something like the one above.
It is actions that give politicians away. Their words are often misleading. Any politician that puts sports stadiums ahead of welfare housing is not a caring person. If that same politician thinks that appearance is better than substance, then us a closet right winger. But when a politician fails to help with a rental crisis then he exposes himself as an overpaid seat warmer.
Good article. Wouldn’t the average voter more likely to be a “registered” nurse and not an “enrolled” nurse. The former hold a bachelors degree and are more common in the health system; the latter hold a TAFE degree or are trained within the hospital system and aren’t as common.
Great article thanks John. Among other statements made during the interview with his chosen "journalist" Albanese said "I'm a social democrat who believes in markets".
Back home in the real world his government is surrounded by market failure, with a housing market that sells investments and wealth creation rather than shelter, a duopoly with a strangle hold on the grocery sector that controls pricing from the farm gate to the kitchen table, and an energy sector dominated by multi nationals who fund both the major political parties to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to the detriment of the global climate.
Albanese these days prefers lying with Tories over fighting them. The class traitor should be sat down with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and reminded of where his roots are.
I knew Albo in the early 1980s, and I heard him speak at certain public forums of the Left later in the decade. I would have said that at that time he was sincere in his democratic socialist convictions. Several dozen people heard him state at a Marxist Summer School, when speaking on behalf of the Young Labor Left, that a new party to the left of the ALP could be a positive thing for the Left generally. I have no reason to doubt that he was sincere at the time in this statement.
However, what I also picked up from the young Albo was something that I encountered more generally among his generation of young ALP Left activists, which was a belief that the broad left in the 1970s had overreached in its radicalism and that the Left in the 1980s needed to be more mindful of the conservatism of the constituencies that it needed to win the support of. While their assessment of the 1970s left was not entirely wrong, in my view it led them to over-correct, at the time and since.
People change with time, and there is no shortage of easily identifiable factors that could cause a young socialist in the ALP in the 1980s to shift towards a more conservative position in the 2020s. I also think Katharine Murphy's Quarterly Essay on Albo and the lessons Labor drew from its 2019 election loss is essential reading for understanding how Labor has reached its present position.
As far as Labor-Greens relations are concerned, the Greens are a different beast to what people in the 1980s envisaged a new party of the left would be. However, the crucial factor, IMHO, is that (a) the Greens have been able to win Lower House seats in State and Federal Parliaments and (b) the Lower House seats that the Greens have been able to win are historical strongholds of the ALP Left. I'm not sure that this was envisaged or expected by a lot of people on the left during the Greens' formative period. However, politics being what it is, and people being human, this was bound to result in conflict and a souring of relations between the Greens and people of inner-urban progressive Labor provenance like Albo, Tanya Plibersek, Jacklyn Trad and Terri Butler in Brisbane, and others. Around where I sit at my laptop in Highgate Hill, relations between the ALP Left and the Greens have become completely toxic.
More generally, I think it is true that many in Labor continue to hanker for a return to a simpler time when Labor was the sole significant party of the centre-left confronting the Coalition as the sole significant force of the centre-right in a simple two-party contest. I think that such people will find it difficult to reconcile themselves psychologically to a post-two party reality in which Labor and the hated Greens are the two significant parties of the centre-left, even if they could be convinced intellectually that this is going to be the way of the future. If one were put to them that Labor-Greens co-operation would be desirable and even necessary, I expect the response would be something like "It would be sensible, but it sticks in the craw".
The other side of this is that I also think there are a lot of people in the Greens who have not let go of the idea that their party will, or should, soon supplant Labor as the only significant centre-left party, and are as unamoured of the idea of a prolonged period of Labor-Greens coexistence and co-operation as the people in Labor that we have just been discussing. They are just as unrealistic in this regard as their opposite numbers in Labor. In situations of sectarian conflict, responsibility seldom lies all on one side.
The other point I would add is that the simple fact that there are contests between the Greens and the Left ALP in inner-urban seats is not something for which either side can be blamed. Nobody in the ALP Left complained in the 1990s when the Greens contested seats and Council wards based on postcode 4101 and got a primary vote with a 1 in front of it. However, those who wish for an end to clashes between Greens and the ALP Left in such areas need to recognise that they can only be ended in the context of (a) a formal co-operation agreement between the two parties and/or electoral reform based on proportional representation and multi-member constituencies.
Thanks John, many are befuddled, bemused and browned off with Albo, and your attempt to get inside his head is enlightening.
I’m interested in his advisers also, after the ghastly appearances he’s made recently. Are they Labor or young hopefuls with little connection to the true believers?
Is he trying to do a Hawkey? Concensus between capital and labour/Labor? Forty years have brought much further polarisation. The “Tories” may tolerate him for now…
It is actions that give politicians away. Their words are often misleading. Any politician that puts sports stadiums ahead of welfare housing is not a caring person. If that same politician thinks that appearance is better than substance, then us a closet right winger. But when a politician fails to help with a rental crisis then he exposes himself as an overpaid seat warmer.
Good article. Wouldn’t the average voter more likely to be a “registered” nurse and not an “enrolled” nurse. The former hold a bachelors degree and are more common in the health system; the latter hold a TAFE degree or are trained within the hospital system and aren’t as common.
I was aiming for someone closer to the median young person in terms of education and income: a typical Labor voter rather than a typical nurse.
Great article thanks John. Among other statements made during the interview with his chosen "journalist" Albanese said "I'm a social democrat who believes in markets".
Back home in the real world his government is surrounded by market failure, with a housing market that sells investments and wealth creation rather than shelter, a duopoly with a strangle hold on the grocery sector that controls pricing from the farm gate to the kitchen table, and an energy sector dominated by multi nationals who fund both the major political parties to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to the detriment of the global climate.
Albanese these days prefers lying with Tories over fighting them. The class traitor should be sat down with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and reminded of where his roots are.
I knew Albo in the early 1980s, and I heard him speak at certain public forums of the Left later in the decade. I would have said that at that time he was sincere in his democratic socialist convictions. Several dozen people heard him state at a Marxist Summer School, when speaking on behalf of the Young Labor Left, that a new party to the left of the ALP could be a positive thing for the Left generally. I have no reason to doubt that he was sincere at the time in this statement.
However, what I also picked up from the young Albo was something that I encountered more generally among his generation of young ALP Left activists, which was a belief that the broad left in the 1970s had overreached in its radicalism and that the Left in the 1980s needed to be more mindful of the conservatism of the constituencies that it needed to win the support of. While their assessment of the 1970s left was not entirely wrong, in my view it led them to over-correct, at the time and since.
People change with time, and there is no shortage of easily identifiable factors that could cause a young socialist in the ALP in the 1980s to shift towards a more conservative position in the 2020s. I also think Katharine Murphy's Quarterly Essay on Albo and the lessons Labor drew from its 2019 election loss is essential reading for understanding how Labor has reached its present position.
As far as Labor-Greens relations are concerned, the Greens are a different beast to what people in the 1980s envisaged a new party of the left would be. However, the crucial factor, IMHO, is that (a) the Greens have been able to win Lower House seats in State and Federal Parliaments and (b) the Lower House seats that the Greens have been able to win are historical strongholds of the ALP Left. I'm not sure that this was envisaged or expected by a lot of people on the left during the Greens' formative period. However, politics being what it is, and people being human, this was bound to result in conflict and a souring of relations between the Greens and people of inner-urban progressive Labor provenance like Albo, Tanya Plibersek, Jacklyn Trad and Terri Butler in Brisbane, and others. Around where I sit at my laptop in Highgate Hill, relations between the ALP Left and the Greens have become completely toxic.
More generally, I think it is true that many in Labor continue to hanker for a return to a simpler time when Labor was the sole significant party of the centre-left confronting the Coalition as the sole significant force of the centre-right in a simple two-party contest. I think that such people will find it difficult to reconcile themselves psychologically to a post-two party reality in which Labor and the hated Greens are the two significant parties of the centre-left, even if they could be convinced intellectually that this is going to be the way of the future. If one were put to them that Labor-Greens co-operation would be desirable and even necessary, I expect the response would be something like "It would be sensible, but it sticks in the craw".
The other side of this is that I also think there are a lot of people in the Greens who have not let go of the idea that their party will, or should, soon supplant Labor as the only significant centre-left party, and are as unamoured of the idea of a prolonged period of Labor-Greens coexistence and co-operation as the people in Labor that we have just been discussing. They are just as unrealistic in this regard as their opposite numbers in Labor. In situations of sectarian conflict, responsibility seldom lies all on one side.
Good points. But Albo was positioning himself to Shorten's right well before 2019 election loss, and did his best to amplify its significance.
The other point I would add is that the simple fact that there are contests between the Greens and the Left ALP in inner-urban seats is not something for which either side can be blamed. Nobody in the ALP Left complained in the 1990s when the Greens contested seats and Council wards based on postcode 4101 and got a primary vote with a 1 in front of it. However, those who wish for an end to clashes between Greens and the ALP Left in such areas need to recognise that they can only be ended in the context of (a) a formal co-operation agreement between the two parties and/or electoral reform based on proportional representation and multi-member constituencies.
Thanks John, many are befuddled, bemused and browned off with Albo, and your attempt to get inside his head is enlightening.
I’m interested in his advisers also, after the ghastly appearances he’s made recently. Are they Labor or young hopefuls with little connection to the true believers?
Is he trying to do a Hawkey? Concensus between capital and labour/Labor? Forty years have brought much further polarisation. The “Tories” may tolerate him for now…